The Weird

Starred review from March 19, 2012
Ambitious in the extreme, the Vandermeers’ latest genre-blurring endeavor (after Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded), which compiles 110 weird stories from the past century, is one of the most far-reaching and inclusive speculative anthologies to ever see print. Alongside familiar names—from Lovecraft and Kafka to Link and Kiernan—the Vandermeers unveil a menagerie of obscure authors and impressive stories from around the world. These short works and novel excerpts explore every definition of weird, including Borges’s surreality (“The Aleph”), Shirley Jackson’s slow descent into darkness (“The Summer People”), Octavia E. Butler’s subtly horrific SF (“Bloodchild”), and Michael Chabon’s ornate unease (“The God of Dark Laughter”). This standard-setting compilation is a deeply affectionate and respectful history of speculative fiction’s blurry edges, and its stunning diversity, excellent quality, and extremely reasonable price point (even more so for the $29.99 trade paperback and $14.99 e-book) will entice a wide variety of readers—including those who think they don’t like “weird.”

Starred review from April 1, 2012
In the 1990s, a new kind of genre story seemed to have sprung up. It was frightening but seldom gory; either not quite as realistic as or less fantastic than it initially promised; very short on monsters no matter how monstrous it got; eerie but just about never ghostly (at least, no ghosts horned into the act); creepy even when it decided to be funny; and un-, far more than super-, natural. The VanderMeers, wife and husband editors of this doorstopper, were in the front rank of those fostering what Jeff explains in the introduction was actually a revival of a fictional manner with roots in the early twentieth century and grand masters who spent their lives ignored and unpublished while setting standards for the manner in America and Europe, respectively. Those two were, of course, H. P. Lovecraft and Franz Kafka, a classic by each of whom The Dunwich Horror and In the Penal Colony appears herein alongside other stellar performances by writers who have faded from top best-sellerdom into obscurity (F. Marion Crawford, Hugh Walpole); are literary stars of the highest magnitude (Rabindranath Tagore, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Jorge Luis Borges); live through only one unforgettable story; and who busily augment the worldwide catalog of weird stories as this is written (most of the contributors). No popular-fiction library should not have this treasure trove.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)